Rome’s antient walls with faces emblazoned
Names considered graffiti now famed signatures
Progression of ages, processing gold to lead
Ardent flames o’ersaw Empire’s best
Symbols of better, nobler days
Ladies myriad: wives, wardens, soldiers, goddesses, dryads
All kinds world to fashion and fill:
Wrenched breast-succour’d babes, thence to smother
Overmothering Emperors into neurotic degeneracy.
Poisoned enemy and lover alike with cyanide wine
Claudius’ mother one suchlike
Blackened hemlock potables
One lacking scruple consumes in midst
With frightful delight, slitted felineyes drinking caprices
Suitor’s choking face, purple as the kingly vestments he wished to grace.
Among serpents and sable widow spiders
Prized as one skilled highly
Plaudited torturer wearing breast bare styled Medean
Swanning a mead-maddened Maenad, hymning wineful Dionysus.
Great dustrising as of steaming geyser, showercap-shape of miasm
Walls in parts rubbled to scree
Scrabbled over by sceaming Gauls
Hun leaders beckoning all manner of rabid barbarians through the breach
Deadshot Tartars in Phrygian caps elapse quarrel’s allotment.
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